The Chargers’ 0-6 start is the headline, but the bigger issue may be that Mike McDaniel and Justin Herbert simply aren’t a fit.
That’s the line cutting through the noise as Los Angeles heads into its bye week. Firing McDaniel would not be the same thing as declaring him incapable as an offensive coordinator.
Those two ideas are already getting tangled together, and they’ll only get more mixed if a change actually comes. McDaniel is one of those coaches who triggers a full-on split: either he’s a visionary, or he’s the nerd in glasses people can’t wait to dunk on.
There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.
What has shown up over six weeks is a mismatch. The Chargers’ offense has looked off in a way that goes beyond being overmatched up front, even if the line has been a patchwork of mid-to-late-round rookies and was once again in shambles in Sunday’s loss to the Chiefs. The problems show up in the little things that are supposed to make this system hum: the odd timing of calls, screen plays where not everyone seems to be on the same page, and the backfield motion that looks more like a collision drill than a functioning offense.
Herbert’s body language tells part of the story too. The way he stares off as he presses the earholes of his helmet to listen for a call, the helmet slam onto the bench, the visible frustration when the issues get framed as leadership questions - all of that points to a quarterback who does not seem to be clicking with the architect of the offense and is doing his best not to show it.
That tension gets at a bigger divide between quarterbacks. Some can live in a Shanahan-style system, which leans more on what happens after the snap.
Others want more control before the ball is even snapped, a clearer map of where the play is going based on coverage and a quicker trigger once the picture confirms itself. Herbert has had success in the past with coaches like Joe Lombardi, who spent nearly a decade as Drew Brees’s quarterbacks coach.
That kind of setup is built more around the presnap process than around asking the quarterback to constantly react to the play unfolding.
There are plenty of obvious reasons to hesitate before making a change this early. McDaniel came into the job with real buzz, and it feels wild to even be talking about moving on after six weeks.
But the Chargers’ defense is making this conversation harder to ignore. Over the last three weeks, Los Angeles ranks second in the NFL in EPA per play allowed.
Even with the team down 13 points late in the third quarter, that defense kept fighting, including a stop on a goal-to-go situation when the game was already basically out of reach.
Then came the sequence that summed up the night: a zero-yard run, a delay of game penalty that was really about avoiding a timeout with the ball backed up against the one-inch line, and a broken-looking passing concept that fell apart in plain view.
That’s why the argument here is less about whether McDaniel is a good coordinator in general and more about whether this offense can ever properly work for Herbert with this version of the scheme. The Chargers should not be sitting at 0-6 with a defense playing this well.
They should be at least 2-4 based on the way that side of the ball has performed. Instead, people are joking about trading Herbert at the deadline, which says plenty about how strange this whole thing has become.
The replacement conversation gets awkward fast because Adam Gase is the other coach on the staff with play-calling experience. That name will immediately bring back memories of his Jets ending, along with Sam Darnold and everything that came after. On the surface, that history makes Gase sound like a disastrous fallback option.
But the fit question is more complicated than that. Darnold turned into a better Shanahan-style post-snap quarterback after his time in San Francisco.
His Super Bowl run came with Klint Kubiak as offensive coordinator, and Kubiak was followed by Brian Fleury, who had been Shanahan’s tight ends coach. Darnold was not the kind of quarterback Gase fit best, while Gase’s rise as a coordinator came with Peyton Manning, one of the NFL’s best-known presnap quarterbacks.
The argument being made here is that Herbert may be closer in preference to Manning, Tom Brady, and Aaron Rodgers - quarterbacks who want more say over the offense - than to Darnold, Tua Tagovailoa, or Brock Purdy. That is not to compare Herbert directly to Manning, only to point to the style preference.
If McDaniel is moved on from, he would likely land back in San Francisco or at one of the other Shanahan offshoots around the league and do well. His creativity is not the issue.
Within that coaching tree, he still looks like an innovator. But this could end up being the clearest example of how a great play-caller and a great quarterback are not always the right mix, and how both coaches and quarterbacks sometimes need the right system more than the right reputation.
And if that sounds like something people will disagree about, well, that’s the point. Some will read this and think it’s nonsense.
Others will fire back with a clown emoji. Both reactions come from the same place: football people don’t all process the game the same way.
In McDaniel’s case, the mistake may have been treating this offense like it was universal. Maybe the better answer for Herbert is not just a new play-caller, but getting this whole ideology out of the offense altogether.
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